Nonomiya is quite bored with his everyday life and uses his imagination to escape his dull life. One day, he encounters a scrap of paper, entitled the “Murder Recipe”. The owner of said paper is Youko Tsukimori, an girl who appears to be completely perfect in every way. The paper lists the possible scenarios in which a person can die in an accident. Intrigued, he keeps the paper in his pocket and goes to ask her about it tomorrow.

The next day, she replies that she hasn’t lost anything. But very soon afterwards, her father dies…in an accident.

While the preview highlights the “Murder Recipe” and the accident, adding a bit of a mystery element to it, the plot elements serve to intensify the anomaly known as Youko Tsukimori.

The key attraction to this light novel is the relationship between Tsukimori and Nonomiya, and the conversations they have with each other. The story is told from Nonomiya’s perspective and throughout the story, he conveys his observational thoughts about Tsukimori. He regards her as the embodiment of perfection; mature, beautiful, intelligent, athletic, and popular. But when he finally comes into contact with her, his perspective of Tsukimori drastically changes as he tries to understand the mysterious girl. The interactions of Nonomiya and Tsukimori are very amusing and refreshing to read, as it becomes a mind game between the two individuals. In addition, the other characters factor in their own perspective and thoughts about the two seemly-opposite protagonists.

The illustrations are very basic in terms of their character design, having an absence of detail. However, it makes up for that in the expressions of those individuals. A key element in this light novel is the relations between these characters and those illustrations convey a particular emotion or feeling, depending on the scene and involved characters. The color illustrations uses a lot of dark and muted colors, which fit the content of the light novel but it causes the characters not be very memorable from a design standpoint.

This particular light novel is a great standalone as it displays very intriguing characters, incorporating a mystery mind game as Nonomiya doubts the perfection known as Youko Tsukimori.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Afterword: This review is very short…mostly because if I added too much detail, it would enter into a bit of spoiler territory. While the conversations between Nonomiya and Tsukimori are very interesting, the actual reveal invokes the same feeling as well.